…I aint got time to bleed…
- Build Your Own Custom Guitar
- Charlie with his finished guitar
- Phil with his finished guitar
- Mark play tests his guitar
- Kevin with his two BYO guitars
- Tuning up
- Stringing up
- Re-crowning the frets
- Working on the frets
- Installing the frets
- Cutting out the body
- Cutting out the body shape
- Carving the thru neck heel
- Preparing the body wings
- Carving a maple neck
- Checking the fretboard for straightness
- Gluing on the fretboard
- Charlie is making a set neck guitar
- Kevin is making a bolt on guitar
- Phil is making a thru neck guitar
- custom course day 1
This is our Build Your Own ‘Custom’ Guitar course, so these instruments represent the highest end of course guitars. We have other courses for those who would like to start with something more basic and you can even build an acoustic if you want to invest a little more time.
This course was great fun with a top bunch of guys, but it is hard work making four guitars in eight days. As time was short, I thought it would be better to run the last few days together into one post (and I ran out of daft quotes for the titles!)
Sat 2pm – 6pm
Day 1 starts late to give people have a chance to travel from wherever they are coming from. This session is spent finalising the design by completing the working drawing which we use to build the guitar from.
Sun, Mon, Tue 10am – 6:30pm (approx)
Build days…we start with a load of wood and start cutting off all the bits of that don’t look like guitars…we aim to finish around 6:30 but there are targets to achieve each day so we carry on until these are met.
A day off
Wednesday…
…the guys go off and have fun around the local area. It gives us a chance to do any last minute ordering or make any patterns I may need for the last few days. I did actually find a little time to do some bleeding, but I also had a couple of guitars to check over before they could be sent out to their new homes after being sold in our online shop.
Day 5 and 6
Thurs, Fri 10am – 6:30pm (approx)
We continue to build, aiming by the end of day 6 to have the guitars ready for spraying. At this point Billy takes over and does the twilight shift to make sure the guitars are ready for assembling the next day.
Day 7
Assembly and setup! This is it, they are done. Four new tasty toys fresh from the Bailey workshop – Isn’t it amazing what can be achieved in a week?
Day 8
Tinkering Time! We have added an extra half day (or as long as it takes) to give us time to thoroughly check over the set up and put any little problems right that may have arisen. It also gives me a chance to take some pictures of the finished instruments (to follow!)